From the backyard of a residence in the city of Pombal, Portugal, a team of paleontologists excavated the enormous fossilized rib cage of what could be the largest dinosaur ever found on the continent of Europe.
It was March 2017 when a homeowner in the Monte Agudo locality first stumbled upon bits of prehistoric bone while commencing construction work in his back garden. He promptly contacted scientists, who began digging that same year.
Only recently did the international team of researchers—consisting of Portuguese and Spanish paleontologists—reveal their findings: They had uncovered the rib cage and vertebrae possibly of an enormous sauropod dinosaur.
Sauropods, such as brontosaurs and larger brachiosaurus, are characterized by their long necks and tails and their herbivorous diet. The brachiosaurus altithorax famously was the first 3D-rendered dinosaur to debut in the 1993 blockbuster “Jurassic Park.”
Sauropods are the largest of all dinosaurs and the biggest land animals ever to have lived.
The recent Pombal specimen is believed to belong to the Brachiosauridae family. It is estimated to be some 82 feet (25 meters) long from tip to tail, standing some 39 feet (12 meters) high. If true, this dinosaur would be the largest ever found in Europe.
The fossils were found in sedimentary rock from the Upper Jurassic period, which dates the behemoth some 145 million to 150 million years old.
Their characteristic long necks allowed Brachiosauridae dinosaurs to reach the foliage of tall trees that other sauropods could not.
Besides their long necks and tails, they are characterized by forelimbs that are markedly larger than their hindlimbs, resulting in a longer torso and proportionally shorter tail—a trait that distinguishes them from other sauropods.
The Brachiosauridae family is comprised of several large dinosaur species that lived from the Upper Jurassic to the Lower Cretaceous (145 million to 100 million years ago).
Based on the disposition of the fossils found in the resident’s back garden, researchers believe it’s highly likely further excavation would yield more of the specimen’s skeleton. That prospect will be explored in future excavation campaigns.
“This mode of preservation is relatively uncommon in the fossil record of dinosaurs, in particular sauropods, from the Portuguese Upper Jurassic.”
The recent find in Pombal underlies greater significance for studying the continental fauna of the Upper Jurassic in Portugal.
“The research in the Monte Agudo paleontological locality confirms that the region of Pombal has an important fossil record of Late Jurassic vertebrates,” Malafaia said.
“In the last decades, the region has provided the discovery of abundant materials very significant for the knowledge of the continental faunas that inhabited the Iberian Peninsula at about 145 million years ago.”
